Last week in this column I discussed one aspect of the evaluation of the returns on publicly funded scientific research, namely the number of patents will and licenses that are transferred to the business sector. This metric was very positively impacted by the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980. Another powerful return is the amount of new scientific knowledge coming out of research. It is therefore vital that research results be accurately communicated and widely disseminated. While conferences, reports, and other interactions among researchers are important to communicating and advancing science, scholarly publications remain critical for sharing research findings more broadly and for maintaining the scholarly record. Remarkably, this essential communication function is accomplished using, on average, less than 1% of a research institution’s budget. I believe that commercializing the results of federally funded research through licensed patents and commercializing the communication of these research results through saleable publications are closely related.
Commercializing federally funded research through patents and licensing is a clear expression of its short-term value. And thanks to Bayh-Dole, it generates income for the investors, their institutions, and the private sector licensing companies, with a resulting boost to the economy. The university community is a tremendous supporter of Bayh-Dole, which pays off for them, quite literally, in the billions of dollars. It is perhaps surprising, then, that some in this community object to publishers’ (both for-profit and non-profit) commercialization of the expression of federally funded research, made possible by significant investments in editorial production, dissemination and archival of peer-reviewed journals.
The financial state of scholarly publishing has in recent years been stressed by two extenuating circumstances. First, institutions’ library and budgets, which still pay for the large majority of publication costs through institutional subscriptions, have not kept up with rising university research budgets. (Curiously not since the time of passage of Bayh-Dole have the two budgets kept pace). Second, the open access movement over the last decade has given rise to the noble goal of providing wide access beyond the community of research institutions (so called public access). To help satisfy this increasing demand and to help compensate for the loss of subscription income, publishers have developed new business models dependent on author payments rather than subscriptions.
Nevertheless, the university library budget problem still persists. Economic modeling shows that a wholesale switch to the author-paid model would increase the publishing costs for the most research-intensive universities. A potential solution for this quandary is a phased approach to increased access, which was first instituted by the NIH in 2007 and is being catalyzed across all federal agencies by the 2013 White House directive. The intention is to provide access to all articles that result from federally funded research after an embargo, which allows those who invest in publication a period of exclusivity to recover that investment. In the coming months, the major funding agencies should be announcing their public access plans, built around this economic compromise. Wide access to journal articles can be provided to any reader after an embargo period that is long enough to not harm the subscriptions that underwrite the articles’ initial publication. If this experiment in the publication marketplace works, it will allow time for the market to shift to other open access models where applicable. If it fails, however, the entire research community needs to be aware that the experiment can have serious, adverse effects on the way that new scientific knowledge is curated and communicated.